'He can be a real hero': Oprah Winfrey offers kind words for Lance as she defends her 'too easy' interview... which she prepared for with mediation and prayer

Oprah Winfrey believes disgraced cycling legend Lance Armstrong has the chance to become 'a real hero' as she defended accusations that she was too soft on him during her exclusive sit-down last week during which Armstrong admitted to doping during his career.

'If he is willing to do the work ... he can be a real hero,' Winfrey said.

The talk-show legend added that her final piece of preparation for the important interview was her clearing her room and praying and meditating to 'be in the space of no judgment, no agenda.'

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Oprah Winfrey believes Lance Armstrong can be 'a real hero' despite his admission that he was doping throughout his cycling career.

'Everybody has the ability within them to rise again. What really matters
in the world is what kind of human being he chooses to be,' she said of Armstrong.

'This is what I think about Lance: I think that that was one of the
hardest things in his life that he has had to do. I think that he was
ready to do it,' she told a crowd during a live performance in Edmonton, Canada, according to the Globe and Mail newspaper.

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Winfrey, whose interview with the seven-time Tour de France champion was on her struggling OWN network, said she regrets the confrontational tone she took in 2006 with author James Frey, who admitted that his memoir A Million Little Pieces was filled with lies and exaggerations.

'My prayer for Lance was to take my ego and any agenda I might have out of it, and to meet him – my presence to his presence,' she said.

'At the end of the meditation, I prayed to surrender the whole thing.

'To
let it go. So that I could be in the space of no judgment, no agenda. I
had made the mistake with James Frey in of having such anger with him,
because he, you know, I thought had lied and betrayed the book club and
all that stuff. And I had all of my own ego and energy in it.'

Winfrey had a heated confrontation with Frey on her program in 2006 after the writer admitted to making up passages in his memoir.

But many critics said Winfrey's interviewing style let Armstrong off the hook too many times.

Winfrey offered a sympathetic ear to Armstrong as he admitted to using performance enhancing drugs during his athletic career.

Winfrey said she didn't know she'd get the interview with Armstrong till one week prior.

'I thought okay, I’ve got four or five months, because he’d said, '‘I’m
going to take my time.’' Then when he called the next day and said,
‘Let’s go.’ I said, like, now?'

She read everything she could to prepare and created a list of 112 questions.

WInfrey had less than a week to prepare for the important interview with Armstrong.

Winfrey said she sympathized with Armstrong's claim that his lie just snowballed into something he could no longer control.

'He said, "You know, it was just so big, I couldn’t see it."

'I said
nobody’s going to believe that. But I understood – that when you’re in
it, it’s no different than you in your life. You turn around and your
kids are seven, then they’re 12. Then they’re 15, then they’re out of
the house. And you’re like how did that happen? Because life is just
happening with you, around you, all the time. You need perspective to
see it.'

Armstrong was close to tears at times when he spoke about the impact of his drug cheating on his family during the second part of his exclusive interview with Oprah Winfrey on Friday night.

Armstrong was on the verge of tears at times during his interview with Winfrey.

Winfrey also drew Armstrong out on
his ex-wife, Kristin, whom he claimed knew just enough about both the
doping and lying to ask him to stop.

He credited her with making him promise that his comeback in 2009 would be drug-free.

'She said to me, "You can do it under one condition: That you never cross that line again,'" Armstrong recalled.

'The line of drugs?' Winfrey asked.

'Yes. And I said, "You've got a deal,'" he replied. 'And I never would have betrayed that with her.'

Armstrong has also been romantically linked to fashion designer Tory Burch, whom he dated in 2007, but her knowledge of the cyclist's doping is not known.

Speaking about his 13-year-old son Luke, the oldest of his five children, Armstrong told Oprah: 'I saw my son defending me and saying, "That's not true. What you're saying about my dad is not true.'"

'That's when I knew I had to tell him.'

Critics said Armstrong hadn't been contrite enough in the first half of the interview, but on Friday night he seemed to lose his composure when Winfrey zeroed in on the emotional drama involving his personal life.

Armstrong, here in 2005 with son Luke, was forced to come clean about his doping to his son.

After Winfrey's interview was over, Armstrong asked her a similar question to most of her subjects: 'How'd I do?'

She interpreted that as him a 'human being seeking validation' and 'the real world [for Mr. Armstrong] is just starting, if you ask me.'